If this really were the reason Huawei would never have been allowed to operate in the US to begin with and Apple would be banned too - for breaking airdrop on behalf of the CCP.

The anti huawei thing only really kicked off when huawei started dominating key telecoms markets.

When they started kicking out huawei tech they also didn't discriminate between smart (where bugs could easily hide) and dumb tech like aerials (where they couldn't), suggesting that protectionism is at least as much a motive as national security.